Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  They had, of course, acquired a new nationality by then. When India was partitioned at independence in 1947, east Bengalis, including Syhletis, became east Pakistanis overnight. After the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 the Syhletis found their nationality had changed again: now they were Bangladeshis. Some Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurant owners find it irritating to be labelled ‘Indian’ but many encourage the misunderstanding, as India conjures up romantic images in the mind of the British public. Syhletis have ensured that the restaurant business stays in their hands by training up their children. One restaurant owner lamented that, as soon as they were able, the children found themselves co-opted into their parents’ or some other relative or friend’s restaurant. Rather than spending their evenings doing their homework, ‘the poor Bangladeshi boys were kept awake until the late hours of night, cooking food or serving curry and rice to the customers’. Consequently, while they might have dreamed of becoming engineers or film stars, they have all become cooks, waiters and restaurant owners instead, and close to 90 per cent of Indian restaurants remain in Syhleti hands.24

  In the 1950s and 60s the early restaurants were frequented by ‘English people who had been in the civil Service and all that’. One restaurant owner remembered that ‘they used to like sometimes if we called them “Sahib”, you know . . . they used to be very happy . . . so we wanted to have a little more tip, so why not? They used to call “Bearer! . . . Bearer!” Nowadays these fellows if anybody called them “Bearer”, they wouldn’t serve him – they would say “Go out of this restaurant!”’ Indian restaurants also became very popular among the student population. The ‘cheap, tasty, and plentiful’ food suited undergraduate needs perfectly. The anthropologist Jack Goody recalled that before the war ‘under graduates [in Cambridge] could sign out from a meal in college and use the savings to buy a restaurant meal’. They would go to the Chinese or Indian restaurants. Many of today’s Indian restaurant regulars discovered the food during the fifties, when they were students. The food writer Michael Boddy remembered how he and his friends ‘would congregate at Indian restaurants . . . I remember Madras curries, the chicken pillaus, chappatties like large grey elephant’s ears, saffron rice and pickles . . . the food was not very good. In fact, looking back on it, it was awful, the greasy-spoon side of Indian cooking.’ But then ‘the cooks were generally off ships and cooking curries was a way of making a living until something better came along’.25

  It was not unknown for the early restaurants simply to buy in catering-size jars of curry paste which the cooks then used as a basis for all the different dishes. The menus were copied from Veeraswamy’s, Shafi’s and the Bahadur brothers’ chain of restaurants, where the first Syhleti restaurant owners had learned their trade. Veeraswamy’s served the curries loved by Anglo-Indians: coloured pilau rice; sour vindaloos, hot with chillies; creamy chicken kormas, thickened with almonds; hot Madras curries, spiked with lemon juice; dopiazas, thick with fried onions; and sweet yellow Parsee dhansaks. The Bahadur brothers and the various owners of Shafi’s followed the lead of the few restaurants that existed in northern India, serving a version of Anglo-Indian, Punjabi and Mughlai cuisine, which included chicken biryanis, rogan joshes, mushroom curries and spinach and potato side dishes. This ensured that, while in India Mughlai cookery never became a national cuisine, outside India Mughlai dishes were regarded as the national food of all Indians.

  The restaurants appealed to their customers as inexpensive places where the food was served promptly. These were not the ideal conditions under which to cook Indian food. In perfect circumstances, all the spices used should be freshly ground on a grinding stone, the dish should be cooked slowly and carefully, in a number of stages, allowing the flavours of the spices to be fully absorbed before the next step in the cooking process is begun. Sophisticated dishes such as biryanis or dum pukht recipes, which aim to produce meat so tender that it slips from the bone, require very slow cooking, preferably in a bed of hot ashes with hot coals placed on the lid of the cooking pot. Under pressure from their impatient customers, Indian cooks invented a number of short cuts which enabled them to serve cheap, quick and tasty meals. Rather than using a paste of freshly ground onions, they used ‘boiled onion paste’. This is made from puréed onions cooked in their own moisture without oil. It gives a good thick base for a curry sauce but imparts a slightly raw onion flavour which is one of the distinctive tastes of Indian restaurant food.26 The curry sauces were prepared well in advance, using pre-ground packaged spices, and a variety of flavour enhancers – asafoetida, fenugreek seeds, tomato purée or ketchup, sugar, puréed mango chutney and monosodium glutamate – to compensate for the lack of fresh ingredients.27 When the meals were being prepared in the kitchen, pre-cooked lamb or chicken, rice, onions and the sauce were assembled to create a biryani; a dash of cream and some chicken created a korma; varying quantities of chilli powder were added to produce jalfrezis and vindaloos. A good dash of food colouring gave the dishes their appealing bright red or yellow appearance. Brightly coloured food has become so much a part of the British experience of Indian food that when the cooks attempt to reduce the food colouring or leave it out, they find the customers send the food back with indignant complaints that it has not been prepared ‘properly’.28

  A code developed which assigned new meanings to traditional titles for Indian dishes. Thus korma came to signify a mild creamy dish, dhansak meant a slightly sweet lentil curry and vindaloo simply indicated that the food would be very hot. The customers have come to expect a standardised menu, whichever Indian restaurant or takeaway they visit. Predictability is part of the appeal. Many regulars stick to one or two dishes which they always eat whenever they go ‘out for an Indian’.

  In the 1960s, global capitalism created the conditions for the spread of Indian food throughout the British population. On one side of the equation the poverty of many people in the newly formed Asian nations, and their willingness to take on menial and unpleasant jobs at unsociable hours, combined with British industrial expansion to encourage increased immigration. Between 1956 and 1958 British immigration laws were changed. Bangladeshis were now able to apply for British passports, and the immigrants already established in the UK brought their families over to join them. There was plenty of work. Pakistanis from the Punjab arrived in the northern towns of Manchester and Bradford to take on night-shift work in the textile factories. It was illegal for women to work at night and white men regarded textile work as women’s work. Similar prejudices meant that the rapidly expanding food-processing, plastics, man-made textiles and rubber industries in west London could not find enough workers. The firms advertised in newspapers in India for labour and by the mid-sixties Asians from the subcontinent made up 12 per cent of Southall’s population. In Tower Hamlets, Bangladeshis took on work in the rag trade which white workers also scorned.29 Metal works and car-production factories in Birmingham similarly absorbed Asian labour. Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs, Gujaratis and Pakistanis added to the swelling community of Bangladeshi Syhletis. Brutal Africanisation programmes in the early seventies resulted in the arrival of many ‘twice migrant’ Indian families from Kenya and Uganda.30

  The growing Asian immigrant community in London stimulated the growth of a little India around Drummond Street, near Euston station. Here, Asian grocers supplied the Bangladeshis with bitter gourds, and fresh hilsa fish to make jhol, their favourite dish. This is a watery stew made with hilsa, aubergines and potatoes. Eating food produced in their home country was very important to Bangladeshis. It enabled them to absorb the essences of Bangladeshi soil and maintain a sustaining link with home.31 Ambala Sweets sold a range of fudgy barfis made from milk boiled down until it forms a thick paste, powdery laddus made from chickpea flour or nuts and sugar, and crispy gulab jamans coated in a delicate rose-water syrup with a soft and melting milky filling. It was on Drummond Street that the ‘twice migrant’ Pathak family (now a household name as Patak’s) set up their first British shop, selling vegetables
, spices, samosas and jars of pastes and pickles. This Gujarati family had moved to Kenya where they ran a sweet shop before they moved on to Britain. The Diwani Bhelpuri House, with its Formica-topped tables and stainless-steel plates, bowls and cups, recreated the atmosphere of a Bombay office workers’ eating house in London. It won awards and helped to popularise Indian vegetarian food in Britain.32 Not far from Portman Square, the old site of the Hindostanee Coffee House, Drummond Street in the late 1960s was a small piece of the Indian subcontinent transported to London.

  From the late nineteenth century until well after the Second World War the British diet was dominated by an emphasis on red meat, accompanied by plain boiled potatoes, carrots or cabbage. Behramji Malabari, who visited in the 1890s, remarked that the British were exceptionally ‘slow of imagination and wanting in taste’ when it came to food. ‘As a rule the Englishman’s dinner is plain and monotonous to a degree. The cook knows nothing of proportion in seasoning his food; knows little of variety, and has a rough slovenly touch.’33 For a large section of the British population a good and ‘proper’ meal consisted of a hearty meat soup or meat and two ‘veg’.34 Olive oil was regarded as a medicine, not a cooking ingredient. It was bought at the chemist’s and kept in the medicine cabinet. It was rubbed on to sore skin or swallowed by the teaspoonful like cod liver oil.

  After curry’s heyday in the Victorian period, a prejudice developed against curry as ‘spicy and disagreeable to respectable middle-class English stomachs’. Curries were also thought of as smelly dishes to cook which was a consideration in the 1950s when middle-class kitchens moved up from the basement into the main living area of the house. In the fifties and sixties, the closest many ever came to eating Indian food was the ‘touch of curry powder in the weekly stew’. Those curries that were produced were extremely British: ‘made with Vencatachellum [curry] powder with swollen sultanas in it and ground minced beef’.35 The curry was either served in the middle of a ring of white rice, or spooned round a pile of white rice in the centre of the plate, although in many homes curry was eaten with potatoes and vegetables rather than with rice. Rice was something most housewives would ‘never have dreamed of serving except as a pudding’. Curry was also eaten with chips, probably due to the fact that many working-class people first encountered curry in Syhleti-run fish-and-chip shops, and initially ate their curries as a sauce on their chips, rather than with rice.36 The most distinctive thing about British curries of the sixties and seventies was that they were almost invariably flavoured with dollops of chutney and fruit. When the comedian Jeremy Hardy joked that, apart from pineapples, apples and sultanas, ‘white mothers’ even add jam to their curries, he was not entirely wrong. In 1916, the Australian Household Guide recommended that a curry could be improved by adding rhubarb, bananas and ‘a spoonful of jam as a substitute for apple’.37 Apricot jam also appeared in vaguely oriental concoctions such as coronation chicken, served at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation lunch in 1953. This mixture of cold chicken, mayonnaise, curry powder, apricot jam or mango chutney and sometimes cream, grated carrot and pineapple, was reminiscent of Anglo-Indian dishes such as Lady Minto’s Soufflé de Volaille Indiénne. These inventive variations on curry as an exotic casserole were often preferred to ‘proper Indian food’.

  A 1970s curry

  1 lb topside steak cut into strips (or can use minced steak)

  2 large stalks celery sliced

  1 tablespoon soy sauce

  1 tablespoon white vinegar

  1 tablespoon oil

  1 tablespoon brown sugar

  1 cup water

  2 whole cloves

  2 heaped teaspoons curry powder

  ¼ teaspoon each of ground ginger, cinnamon and mixed herbs

  3 heaped teaspoons fruit chutney

  ½ cup sultanas

  ¾ cup tomato juice

  salt

  8 whole black peppercorns

  1 or 2 rings fresh or canned pineapple (diced)

  Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Sauté the celery and the meat until well browned. Add the curry powder, stir and cook for 3 minutes. Add spices, tomato juice, chutney, soy sauce, vinegar and sugar. Stir well. Add remaining ingredients, stir well. Cover and simmer for 50 minutes. Serve with hot rice. Serves 4–6.

  All this was to change in the 1960s and 70s: sex, drugs and rock and roll were accompanied by a revolution in British eating habits. In 1958 over two million Britains went abroad for their holidays. Travel expanded people’s horizons and made them open to new foods. ‘Little’ Italian restaurants became fashionable. Inside, a spurious ‘Italian’ atmosphere was created with dim lighting, red tablecloths and empty Chianti bottles used as candlesticks. The Italians dishing up spaghetti in these trattorias cautiously introduced olive oil and garlic into their cooking. After the austerity of the post-war years, food re-emerged as a middle-class status symbol. Now that middle-class women were themselves working in the kitchens, they relished the chance to show off by whipping up sophisticated and ‘authentic’ dishes for their dinner-party guests.38 Elizabeth David began her campaign to improve British eating habits and, in her bossy tone, persuaded the middle classes that the ‘authentic’ flavours of fresh basil and mozzarella were far better than tired dried mixed herbs and Cheddar cheese.39 Delicatessens opened, grocers increased their range, to provide for the demand for the new authentic ingredients necessary to make good Italian and French food. The middle classes looking for an affordable and interesting evening out began to explore the Indian restaurants. One writer remembered how his diet in the 1960s of ‘mince and potatoes, haddock and chips . . . cheese omelettes . . . mutton pies . . . lagers and lime’ had, by 1974, changed to ‘chicken bhunas . . . sweet and sour porks . . . lamb kebabs and . . . bottles of retsina’.40

  The Syhletis responded by opening new restaurants and improving the quality of their cooking. Nawab Ali gave his Calcutta restaurant in Cardiff to a friend – who gambled it away – but he had soon set up another in Plymouth called the Bengal. Haji Shirajul Islam returned to the restaurant business by opening the Karachi in Russell Square and then another, larger version in Marchmont Street, so that his customers would no longer have to queue. This he sold, only to buy the Moti Mahal in Glendower Place and another in Chelsea.41 By 1970 there were two thousand Indian restaurants in Britain. Asian immigration, combined with British wealth, and an interest in the foods of other cultures, came together to make Indian restaurants part of the landscape of every British town, and curries part of the diet of virtually every British person.

  The majority of the population living in the South Asian subcontinent would not have recognised the food served as Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. In the early 1960s Margaret Orr Deas took an Indian friend to a restaurant. He politely remarked that ‘we have very different food in India’ and in the following days worked his way along all the Indian restaurants on Westbourne Grove trying to find something that approximated the food that he was used to at home.42 Besides the inexperience of the cooks, and the need to take short cuts, there was also the problem of unadventurous British palates. ‘In those days garlic was not liked at all; even coriander was frowned on.’43 The cooks produced milder, creamier dishes with far less chilli and black pepper than would have been used in India. Haji Shirajul Islam commented, ‘Of course the food is not like in Syhlet – there we use all fresh things, fresh spices, that makes a lot of difference, and the meat and fish and everything, all fresh.’ He never ate the curries prepared in his own restaurants, preferring to cook for himself at home. On the other hand, for a generation of Indians growing up outside India, this food was as authentically Indian as the food they ate in their homes. Haji Shirajul Islam’s son even preferred his father’s restaurant curries. ‘When he goes to the restaurant he eats Madras – hot one . . . Me I always eat in the house. When I offer him food he eats it, but he says it’s not tasty like restaurant food, because he’s the other way round now.’44 For generations of British customers, and even second-g
eneration Indians, the vindaloos and dhansaks, tarka dhals and Bombay potatoes, are Indian food. In comparison, food cooked in an Indian home can seem disappointingly unfamiliar and lacking in restaurant tastes.

  Distinctively British ways of eating Indian food have developed in the restaurants. Poppadoms and pickles would normally be eaten with the food in India. In Britain they are served as a starter as a way of fulfilling the European expectation that a meal should be divided into courses. Drinking beer with a curry is another very British practice. The idea is supposed to have originated at Veeraswamy’s with the King of Denmark, who is said to have sent a barrel of Carlsberg to the restaurant every Christmas, in order to ensure that he would always have lager to drink with his duck vindaloo. But the British in India had been drinking pale ale with their roast meat and curries since the late eighteenth century. Already in 1810 Thomas Williamson was of the opinion that ‘nothing can be more gratifying . . . after eating curry’.45 The men who discovered curry on the way home from the pub in the 1940s and 50s were also accustomed to the combination, and once Indian restaurants acquired licences they stocked beer and lager for their customers who had developed a liking for a few beers, a hot vindaloo and chips.

  A new range of dishes have been invented in British Indian restaurants. The Gaylord restaurant in Mortimer Street, London, was probably the first restaurant to acquire a tandoor oven. In 1968, The Good Food Guide reported that they were using a ‘proper mud oven’ to produce ‘tandoori chicken masal’ and ‘authentic puddingy “nan”’ for 1/6.46 The tandoor is a dome-shaped clay or brick oven which is heated by a wood fire at the bottom. Marinated meat is cooked on skewers inside the tandoor, and nan breads are baked by pressing the dough on to its sides. This was a traditional Punjabi way of cooking and imparted a smoky rich taste to the food. Few Punjabis would have had a tandoor at home but the people used to take their food to a public tandoor where it was cooked for them.47 Other restaurants followed Gaylord’s lead and installed a tandoor which enabled them to liven up their menus with smoky roast chicken tikka. This led to the invention of chicken tikka masala, as described in the first chapter, when tandoori chicken was served in a tomato and cream sauce.